small-brained giants in Hollywood, the end of feminism, the joy of fart jokes and how he predicts all those trends

If you had met Michael Crichton three decades ago, you could easily have imagined a traditional future for him. A stellar student at the Harvard Medical School and armed with an impressive intellect, Crichton seemed headed for a life as a researcher or hospital administrator, the type of overachiever who would make his mark in science or public health. You never would have predicted the intense young med student would give up medicine and emerge as a dominant talent in fields of popular culture--a man who simultaneously topped all three key indicators of current American thought: the best-seller list, the box office tallies and the Nielsen ratings.

What's even more unlikely is that Crichton has done so not by pandering to mass tastes but by catering to uncounted multitudes who don't mind stretching their minds while being entertained.

Consider what Crichton has accomplished in publishing. Instead of writing cheesy, sex-filled potboilers that fill the best-seller racks, Crichton invented a genre aimed at smart readers. He elevated the basic thriller by setting it against a backdrop of important current issues--the Japanese juggernaut in "Rising Sun," sexual harassment in "Disclosure"--and creating books that were as informative as they were fun to read.

He's been no ordinary success in Hollywood, either. Some of the movies based on his books and screenplays, such as "Jurassic Park" and "Twister," have been tremendous box office successes. And the one TV show he created--"ER"—is arguably the smartest hour on TV ever to top the ratings.

Bouncing among books, movies and TV has worked well for Crichton. More than 100 million of his books have been printed, and his movies have grossed more than a billion dollars. In its 1998 survey of the wealthiest entertainers, "Forbes" put Crichton at number seven and mused that "he could probably sell the concepts in his head for a few hundred million dollars."

Part of Crichton's success stems from his knack for predicting trends and events and for honing in on hot issues with uncanny timing. "If you ever find in a publisher's catalog the announcement of an impending Crichton novel called 'Armageddon,' gather your loved ones and head for the hills," advised one journalist.

Crichton is best known for his "Jurassic Park," a work he began in 1984 and didn't complete until 1990. The book, about the re-creation of dinosaurs from DNA culled from mosquitoes preserved in amber, popularized the cloning controversy. After it was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, it became one of the highest-grossing films of all time, earning $ 912 million.

Then came the sequel, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which Spielberg also made into a movie. Crichton's most recent novel, 1996's "Airframe," is in part an indictment of airline deregulation and the resulting deterioration of maintenance and safety. In it, Crichton takes on the media--a subplot has journalists who cover a plane accident being less concerned about the veracity of their reporting than they are about the tidiness of their stories.

Crichton's eagerness to tackle controversial issues makes headlines, but it also generates criticism. "Jurassic Park" earned the ire of academics who claimed it was antiscience. Literary critics chide Crichton for his simplistic or two-dimensional characters, who get short shrift in favor of complicated plots and detailed situations.

Critics have been kinder to some of Crichton's other works, including his masterful study of Jasper Johns and a collection of autobiographical essays, "Travels." In the latter, Crichton describes his thrill-seek- ing past--he used to scuba dive, climb mountains (including a memorable hike up Mount Kilimanjaro) and swim with sharks. He was born in October 1942 in Chicago, half a mile from the hospital now used as the setting for "ER." He was the oldest of four children, and his relationship with his father, an executive editor at "Advertising Age," was often tense. As he writes in "Travels," "My father and I had not had an easy time together. We had never been the classic boy and his dad. As far as I was concerned, he was a first-rate son of a bitch."

When Crichton was in third grade, he wrote a nine-page play for a puppet show, which his father dismissed as the most cliche-ridden piece he had ever read. Undaunted, Crichton went on to publish his first article at the age of 14 on "The New York Times."

Crichton attended Roslyn High School in New York, where he was a Latin scholar, a student journalist and, already 6'7", a basketball star. He still holds several records there.

He went to Harvard, where he planned to become a writer, but he says the English department was more interested in producing professors than cultivating writers. He switched to anthropology and took premed courses.

After graduating, Crichton spent a year lecturing in anthropology at Cambridge University before enrolling at Harvard Medical School. Until then he had been supported by his family, but he paid his way through medical school by writing thrillers under the pseudonyms Jeffery Hudson and John Lange. (The first was a pun on his height--which was now 6'9"; Hudson was a dwarf courtier in the service of Charles I.) "A Case of Need" by Jeffery Hudson won the 1968 Edgar award and was the first time Crichton addressed real-life events with what was to become his signature timeliness. The book is about abortion.

In 1969 Crichton published "The Andromeda Strain" under his own name while still in med school. He was paid $ 250,000 for the film rights. When he visited the movie set on the Universal Studios lot, a young director working there gave Crichton a tour: He was Steven Spielberg.

Two more thrillers followed in 1972 and 1973: The novel "The Terminal Man," in which an experimental surgical procedure goes awry, and the movie "Westworld," a science fiction story about a theme park of the future where tourists enact their fantasies. Crichton also later wrote and directed "The Great Train Robbery," which starred Sean Connery, who became a good friend.

Crichton has been married four times and has a ten-year-old daughter. In 1988 he married his current wife, Anne-Marie Martin, an actor and screenwriter who was his collaborator on the screenplay for "Twister." Crichton confesses that two of his previous wives made him see a psychotherapist, and he remains committed to therapy. It hasn't cured his workaholism, however; when Crichton is working, his wife has said, "It's like living with a body and Michael is somewhere else."

His work habits have paid off--Crichton is probably the highest-paid writer in America. A "Time" magazine cover story in 1995 touted him as "The Hit Man With the Golden Touch." He reportedly earned $ 10 million for the film rights to "Airframe" alone.

Despite his hectic schedule, Crichton found time to meet with Assistant Managing Editor John Rezek and Contributing Editor David Sheff for a rare interview. Here's their report:

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"Crichton was concentrating on one of several current projects when we

arrived at his Santa Monica office. (He has homes in Los Angeles, New York and

Hawaii.) He was in postproduction for 'The 13th Warrior'--a movie due out this

year that's based on his book 'Eaters of the Dead'--and he was getting ready to

launch his own Web site, www.crichton-official.com.

"Though Crichton is famously tall, no one is quite prepared for just how

tall he is. He greeted us looking freshly tanned from Hawaii, dressed in black

trousers and a polo shirt, and led us through a labyrinth of small hallways that

had the effect of making him seem even taller. You get the sense he seldom

permits himself the luxury of straightening up.

"We talked in a bare office and, once settled in a desk chair, Crichton

adopted an impressive physical concentration: He didn't fidget, he rarely moved

though his face was always animated and expressive. He has a steady no-nonsense

gaze and was once described as being 'affably diffident.' There were often long

silences between our questions and his answers. Far from attempting to evade the

questions, he was seeking the most difficult of responses: those that are

simple, and responsible and honest."

PLAYBOY: Your books often seem eerily prescient. How does it feel when they

turn out to anticipate real-life events or trends?

CRICHTON: It depends. People said Airframe was prescient when a United

Airlines flight dropped 1000 feet over the Pacific. But there are a certain

number of turbulence-related injuries every year, and that book was based on a

couple of real incidents. The lesson: Wear your seat belt. When Twister came out

in May of whatever year it was, all these tornadoes hit. Everyone said, "Isn't

it amazing? He predicted it!" No, it's May--there are always hundreds of

tornadoes. It's tornado season. On the other hand, certain things have surprised

me. When I was working on The Great Train Robbery, I went into Victorian

England, then an eccentric and obscure period to write about. At the time the

book was published, the period had a revival. When I was writing Rising Sun, the

Berlin Wall was coming down. Everyone was look- ing west; no one was looking

east. People would ask what I was working on and I'd say, "Japan," and they'd

ask, "Japan?" as if I had said "Sanskrit." But when the book came out it

coincided with George Bush's trip to Japan and enormous interest in

U.S.-Japanese relations because of the trade imbalance. I was as surprised as

anybody else.

PLAYBOY: How do you decide which political or social problems to tackle?

CRICHTON: Certain issues just stay with me while others work themselves out.

In the past, certain stories were fueled by my outrage, but then I would lose

the outrage and wouldn't have the motor to do that project anymore. I'd outgrown

it. Sometimes events bypass it. And sometimes somebody else does a project that

makes the issues go away. Or at least I think, Well, that's been done, at least

for now. I've been interested in doing something about political correctness,

for instance. It gives me the creeps. But my sense is it's started to give a lot

of people the creeps. I don't think I'll have to write about it. It will defeat

itself because of its basic anti-American quality.

PLAYBOY: In Disclosure, you took on sex- ual harassment. Some people feel

it's a central issue in the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. Do you agree?

CRICHTON: Lewinsky certainly shows one thing I tried to address in

Disclosure: the power of the victim. Feminists still don't acknowledge that the

person who is sexually harassed has an enormous amount of power. Monica Lewinsky

has shown she has quite a bit of power, hasn't she? Whether she ultimately

brings down a president or not, this woman has proved that the so-called victim

can be very powerful.

PLAYBOY: Feminists would disagree.

CRICHTON: The Clinton scandal has put the final nail in the coffin of

feminism, which has been in drastic decline for several years. People aren't

stupid. They see the inconsistency and hypocrisy: Brock Adams? Out! Robert